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Monthly Archives: April 2010

Arizona’s state house just can’t resist at this point. Could it be any more obvious that they just want to see how far they can push it without bursting out laughing?

“The thing is that we’re concerned about the cultural impact of overemphasiz…pffffhahahaha, oh man. Sorry, didn’t mean to dick you around but we pretty much just hate brown people.”

Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.

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Arizona’s superintendent for public instruction, Tom Horne, has said he’s backing the measure because ethnic-studies programs encourage “ethnic chauvinism”; he’s also suggested that such programs could breed secessionist sentiment among Hispanic students.

Because obviously letting this poor little girl grow up to think the President really called the riot police on her and experience whatever warping of her political mindset that entails is better than admitting to yourself that you’d sooner disappear into a paranoid fantasy world than try to cope with the fact that Your Team isn’t going to win every single election ever.

“No honey, the President really does hate us and really is so concerned with crushing our individual spirits!”

“Yes honey, this is evidence of an insidious socialist masterplot!”

“Dear, I’m sorry Santa didn’t bring you a bike. The President probably stole it and personally redistributed it to some undeserving dark-skinned person!”

“Well, you probably would’ve gotten into Yale if not for that time in ’10 with the riot police. I’m sure Obama’s Thugs took note of our presence that day.”

I mean at what point does willfully deceiving yourself become tiresome? If you’re so fucking nuts that you’re going to interpret being casually moved outt’ve the way of a presidential motorcade without further event as some iron-fisted Stalinist show of consolidated state power (I love how these Quincy crowd control cops became “Obama’s Riot Police” in the Tea Party hivemind btw) then I can only assume you must spend a staggering amount of mental energy keeping the facade up in your day to day business…

God damn socialist dry-rot, I just know the President sends His Thugs out here to infect my house with fungus when nobody’s looking.

I bought some guitar cleaner shit off Amazon the other day. The one I purchased was listed in “used — like new” condition. This particular brand is sold both in individual bottles and in a big kit containing 1 of each thing they make at a significant discount. People will snatch the kit up and then resell the bottles individually for a $10 profit or so, and this was what I assumed was going on.

Nope! In this asshole’s mind “used — like new” means “bought it, used half, now want to get my money back by passing it along.” Piece of shit.

later: dickhead let me keep it + a refund in exchange for not giving him negative feedback. I almost want to tell him to take a hike so he can’t just turn around and do it again, but w/e. I’m pretty broke lately. “Sorry about what happened,” he says. Oh the passive voice! What exactly did happen, then, I wonder? I bet some wicked postal service employee stole half my goop.

When my mom (Tea Partier) says the movement – and her personal dislike of Obama which has already reached the point of obsession – has nothing to do with racism am I supposed to pretend I don’t remember her warning me as a child about how one day white people weren’t going to be the majority? What exactly is the point of bringing that up if you aren’t operating in terms of race? I fail to see how that even enters your mind.

I mean as I see it there are two ways to look at changing cultural demographics. When I think of a future where hispanics become a much greater proportion of the population than they are now (don’t bother me about links. I’m lazy, but yknow what I mean: blah blah by 2050 comprise 25% of the yadda yadda etc…) I think that more of the country will become like California, or perhaps South Florida. We’ll go to different restaurants and dance different dances and popular music will probably further the trend of ripping off latin traditions rather than black ones and when you channel surf more stations will be in Spanish. Big fucking deal.

Obviously this isn’t the only view though, as some people seem to think that America just naturally belongs to the White People and any of this assimilation/cultural melting pot shit is an affront to their white ancestors and the white founding fathers and the very state of whiteness itself. Another memory that sticks out at me is being a young kid in a Blockbuster and seeing some dude get visibly upset that he had accidentally grabbed a Spanish-dubbed copy of whatever Rob Schneider shitfest was playing at the moment. The clerk points it out to him to check whether he intends to rent that version and the guy gets all “pffft, only in California.” Yes, businesses make decisions that cater to existing markets in order to maximize profit. Holy shit, imagine that… all that free market shit suddenly falls away when the market realizes that motherfuckers who are comfortable speaking Spanish would prefer to watch the same old mind-rotting shit we all enjoy in their native language. I mean it’s not like they went and hired a bunch of illegal immigrants and redid the whole movie on the cheap and somehow took our jerbs in the process… it’s just a fucking dub and most likely the people who worked on it are Spanish-speaking Americans. Holy shit, a job was created! The nice standard acceptable white version of “Deuce Bigalow” or whatever was still available and all he had to do was walk back across the store and grab it (or not, since the clerk offered to do it) but for some reason the simple fact that it existed bothered him. It must be more of that “special treatment” that people are so worked up about.

What a bunch of assholes… why isn’t the practice of defaulting any film/music/work of art/whatever to English seen as a special favor to whitey? I mean for fuck’s sake, I have a collection of odd heavy metal MP3s from all around the world. One thing I find particularly amusing is collecting metal from unlikely-sounding countries. Greek metal, Bulgarian metal, Iraqi metal, or whatever — just the idea that there’s this worldwide common musical language is so cool to me. My point in bringing it up is: guess what? These fucking songs are in English. Fuckers that can’t even speak the language comfortably in a conversation will sometimes labor to translate what they’re trying to say into English so that they can get some commercial success. (Famously, towards the beginning of In Flames’ career their singer had help translating his lyrics into English.)

Anyway, I’m rambling on pretty severely here but what I’m trying to say is that, while I don’t think it’s fair to say the Tea Party is an overtly racist movement and the teabaggers just “hate the black president” or whatever kind’ve anodyne characterization you might get from your friendly Olbermann types, I think a bunch of them do harbor racial resentments thatinfluence their opinions about Obama and social services in general. What we find repeatedly is that these folks have no problem with Social Security, Medicare, etc. when they’re receiving the benefits, there’s just some kind of mysterious other group of unworthy leechers that they’d rather trail off and mumble a bit about than clearly define. There’s some cognitive dissonance going on here or something. I mean I don’t exactly know, but for them to try and claim race plays no part at all when the loss of an election is getting characterized as the theft of an entire country/way of life/whatever (“We have to take our country back!”) and polling consistently shows that race plays a greater role in their decision-making than the average person… come the fuck on. I don’t know if they realize they’re lying — it’s kinda hard to look at yourself and go, yeah, I’m kind’ve a racist shithead — but they sure are doing it. I have trouble finding the right way to describe it — I don’t think it’s fair to just call them racists, because for the most part they’re not sitting around talking about lynching the President and throwing n-bombs and pontificating on the superiority of the Aryan race and whatnot, but they are… I don’t know, racially-influenced? Racially-aware? Semi-racists? Racist-lite? I don’t know where to go with it. They don’t hate brown people, that’s not fair– but they sure are unusually concerned about them, yknow? Maybe we can go with Manchurian Racists — day to day they don’t focus on the subject much, but then Obama gets elected, the GOP suggests they play a little solitaire and before they know it they find themselves going on about how black folks should just try harder and shut the fuck up about that whole lasting cultural legacy of us owning them thing. It’s confusing.

So anyway, back to my original point: next time someone says to me “Tea Party not about racism!” and I have explicit memories of them being racist in the past is it fair to bring it up? I worry that it could get ugly.

Incidentally I remember reading other things Rep. Hunter had said recently and thinking that he got a lot stupider, or at least a lot more desperate to stir up controversy. Not the case, as it turns out the old Rep. Hunter retired and was replaced by his son. Ironic that we find him complaining about the abuse of a birthright.

Well, at least this horrendous Arizona law is leading to some conservative infighting. Maybe this is what it takes for a few more of ’em to realize how nutty their shit has really gotten.

When most of us are stopped by the police while driving and asked for our licenses, we comply. Not Mike Gerson, apparently. He gives a “distinctly American response,” and resolutely refuses. If that seems strange, hey, it’s just Gerson being Gerson. He’s more morally and politically serious than the rest of us.

Or so his column today would lead you to believe, if it weren’t so much rhetorical pose. I’m sure Mike actually dutifully complies when asked for “his papers” by the police during traffic stops. Here is Gerson:

This law creates a suspect class, based in part on ethnicity, considered guilty until they prove themselves innocent. It makes it harder for illegal immigrants to live without scrutiny – but it also makes it harder for some American citizens to live without suspicion and humiliation. Americans are not accustomed to the command “Your papers, please,” however politely delivered. The distinctly American response to such a request would be “Go to hell,” and then “See you in court.”

The Arizona agency tasked with training 15,000 law officers to enforce the state’s controversial new illegal immigration law has asked federal authorities for assistance, but administration officials say it is unclear whether the government will help.

Lyle Mann, executive director of the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board, says federal assistance is “critical” to what he describes as an unprecedented effort to prepare officers as soon as this summer to enforce the law, which gives local police authority to identify and arrest illegal immigrants.